Railroad bridge at sunset: second scanned shot (via Epson 4990)

[dh003i]

This is a shot taken with my 4x5 Linhof & Nikkor-SW 90/4.5 at f/16 or f/22; I think exposure time was 1 second on Kodak E100VS film. Frank Petronio scanned it with his Epson 4990. (Thank you, Frank). I wanted to see how much information I could get out of it with a consumer-grade flatbed.

The first image is the entire picture; the second two are crops of 3x3 inch sections (if the original is printed at 150 dpi). From looking at the original image's pixel dimensions, I can tell that this is an 1100 dpi scan.

The original file is about a 25 megapixel file. And I've found that on a per-pixel level, the pixels in this file have more information than pixels from a similar shot taken with my Olympus E-3 (10 MP). This piece of film was obviously screwed up, with light-leaks on the bottom & a big piece of flare; I had removed that, but then I had to restart my computer and lost the changes, so I decided not to do it again.

I have another identical picture without the light leaks which I've submitted to Image City Gallery to see if it is accepted. Whether it is or isn't, I'll later have that one scanned with an Aztek Premier to do a comparison. Looking at the transparency, it still looks very sharp to me even under a 20x loupe.

[dh003i]

PS: The 3x3 inch sections look "ok" at 150 dpi. They'd probably look better if the scan resolution had been 2000 or 2400 dpi; but how much better is questionable. As scanned at 1100 dpi, the 3x3 inch crops would look great at 300 dpi. That would be a 3.7x enlargement, which is in line with what most people say is the enlargement you can expect from these scanners. I'm not sure how much scanning at 2000 dpi would add.